Although Python makes sending email relatively easy via the smtplib
module, Django provides a couple of light wrappers over it. These wrappers are
provided to make sending email extra quick, to make it easy to test email
sending during development, and to provide support for platforms that can’t use
SMTP.

fail_silently, auth_user and auth_password have the same functions
as in send_mail().

Each separate element of datatuple results in a separate email message.
As in send_mail(), recipients in the same
recipient_list will all see the other addresses in the email messages’
“To:” field.

For example, the following code would send two different messages to
two different sets of recipients; however, only one connection to the
mail server would be opened:

message1=('Subject here','Here is the message','from@example.com',['first@example.com','other@example.com'])message2=('Another Subject','Here is another message','from@example.com',['second@test.com'])send_mass_mail((message1,message2),fail_silently=False)

The return value will be the number of successfully delivered messages.

Header injection is a security exploit in which an attacker inserts extra
email headers to control the “To:” and “From:” in email messages that your
scripts generate.

The Django email functions outlined above all protect against header injection
by forbidding newlines in header values. If any subject, from_email or
recipient_list contains a newline (in either Unix, Windows or Mac style),
the email function (e.g. send_mail()) will raise
django.core.mail.BadHeaderError (a subclass of ValueError) and, hence,
will not send the email. It’s your responsibility to validate all data before
passing it to the email functions.

If a message contains headers at the start of the string, the headers will
simply be printed as the first bit of the email message.

Here’s an example view that takes a subject, message and from_email
from the request’s POST data, sends that to admin@example.com and redirects to
“/contact/thanks/” when it’s done:

fromdjango.core.mailimportsend_mail,BadHeaderErrorfromdjango.httpimportHttpResponse,HttpResponseRedirectdefsend_email(request):subject=request.POST.get('subject','')message=request.POST.get('message','')from_email=request.POST.get('from_email','')ifsubjectandmessageandfrom_email:try:send_mail(subject,message,from_email,['admin@example.com'])exceptBadHeaderError:returnHttpResponse('Invalid header found.')returnHttpResponseRedirect('/contact/thanks/')else:# In reality we'd use a form class# to get proper validation errors.returnHttpResponse('Make sure all fields are entered and valid.')

Not all features of the EmailMessage class are
available through the send_mail() and related
wrapper functions. If you wish to use advanced features, such as BCC’ed
recipients, file attachments, or multi-part email, you’ll need to create
EmailMessage instances directly.

Note

This is a design feature. send_mail() and
related functions were originally the only interface Django provided.
However, the list of parameters they accepted was slowly growing over
time. It made sense to move to a more object-oriented design for email
messages and retain the original functions only for backwards
compatibility.

EmailMessage is responsible for creating the email
message itself. The email backend is then
responsible for sending the email.

For convenience, EmailMessage provides a simple
send() method for sending a single email. If you need to send multiple
messages, the email backend API provides an alternative.

The EmailMessage class is initialized with the
following parameters (in the given order, if positional arguments are used).
All parameters are optional and can be set at any time prior to calling the
send() method.

subject: The subject line of the email.

body: The body text. This should be a plain text message.

from_email: The sender’s address. Both fred@example.com and
Fred<fred@example.com> forms are legal. If omitted, the
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL setting is used.

to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses.

bcc: A list or tuple of addresses used in the “Bcc” header when
sending the email.

connection: An email backend instance. Use this parameter if
you want to use the same connection for multiple messages. If omitted, a
new connection is created when send() is called.

attachments: A list of attachments to put on the message. These can
be either email.MIMEBase.MIMEBase instances, or (filename,content,mimetype) triples.

headers: A dictionary of extra headers to put on the message. The
keys are the header name, values are the header values. It’s up to the
caller to ensure header names and values are in the correct format for
an email message. The corresponding attribute is extra_headers.

cc: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the “Cc” header
when sending the email.

reply_to: A list or tuple of recipient addresses used in the “Reply-To”
header when sending the email.

send(fail_silently=False) sends the message. If a connection was
specified when the email was constructed, that connection will be used.
Otherwise, an instance of the default backend will be instantiated and
used. If the keyword argument fail_silently is True, exceptions
raised while sending the message will be quashed. An empty list of
recipients will not raise an exception.

message() constructs a django.core.mail.SafeMIMEText object (a
subclass of Python’s email.MIMEText.MIMEText class) or a
django.core.mail.SafeMIMEMultipart object holding the message to be
sent. If you ever need to extend the
EmailMessage class, you’ll probably want to
override this method to put the content you want into the MIME object.

recipients() returns a list of all the recipients of the message,
whether they’re recorded in the to, cc or bcc attributes. This
is another method you might need to override when subclassing, because the
SMTP server needs to be told the full list of recipients when the message
is sent. If you add another way to specify recipients in your class, they
need to be returned from this method as well.

attach() creates a new file attachment and adds it to the message.
There are two ways to call attach():

You can pass it a single argument that is an
email.MIMEBase.MIMEBase instance. This will be inserted directly
into the resulting message.

Alternatively, you can pass attach() three arguments:
filename, content and mimetype. filename is the name
of the file attachment as it will appear in the email, content is
the data that will be contained inside the attachment and
mimetype is the optional MIME type for the attachment. If you
omit mimetype, the MIME content type will be guessed from the
filename of the attachment.

In addition, message/rfc822 attachments will no longer be
base64-encoded in violation of RFC 2046, which can cause
issues with displaying the attachments in Evolution and Thunderbird.

attach_file() creates a new attachment using a file from your
filesystem. Call it with the path of the file to attach and, optionally,
the MIME type to use for the attachment. If the MIME type is omitted, it
will be guessed from the filename. The simplest use would be:

It can be useful to include multiple versions of the content in an email; the
classic example is to send both text and HTML versions of a message. With
Django’s email library, you can do this using the EmailMultiAlternatives
class. This subclass of EmailMessage has an
attach_alternative() method for including extra versions of the message
body in the email. All the other methods (including the class initialization)
are inherited directly from EmailMessage.

To send a text and HTML combination, you could write:

fromdjango.core.mailimportEmailMultiAlternativessubject,from_email,to='hello','from@example.com','to@example.com'text_content='This is an important message.'html_content='<p>This is an <strong>important</strong> message.</p>'msg=EmailMultiAlternatives(subject,text_content,from_email,[to])msg.attach_alternative(html_content,"text/html")msg.send()

By default, the MIME type of the body parameter in an
EmailMessage is "text/plain". It is good
practice to leave this alone, because it guarantees that any recipient will be
able to read the email, regardless of their mail client. However, if you are
confident that your recipients can handle an alternative content type, you can
use the content_subtype attribute on the
EmailMessage class to change the main content type.
The major type will always be "text", but you can change the
subtype. For example:

msg=EmailMessage(subject,html_content,from_email,[to])msg.content_subtype="html"# Main content is now text/htmlmsg.send()

send_messages(email_messages) sends a list of
EmailMessage objects. If the connection is
not open, this call will implicitly open the connection, and close the
connection afterwards. If the connection is already open, it will be
left open after mail has been sent.

It can also be used as a context manager, which will automatically call
open() and close() as needed:

By default, a call to get_connection() will return an instance of the
email backend specified in EMAIL_BACKEND. If you specify the
backend argument, an instance of that backend will be instantiated.

The fail_silently argument controls how the backend should handle errors.
If fail_silently is True, exceptions during the email sending process
will be silently ignored.

All other arguments are passed directly to the constructor of the
email backend.

Django ships with several email sending backends. With the exception of the
SMTP backend (which is the default), these backends are only useful during
testing and development. If you have special email sending requirements, you
can write your own email backend.

Instead of sending out real emails the console backend just writes the
emails that would be sent to the standard output. By default, the console
backend writes to stdout. You can use a different stream-like object by
providing the stream keyword argument when constructing the connection.

To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:

EMAIL_BACKEND='django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a
convenience that can be used during development.

The file backend writes emails to a file. A new file is created for each new
session that is opened on this backend. The directory to which the files are
written is either taken from the EMAIL_FILE_PATH setting or from
the file_path keyword when creating a connection with
get_connection().

To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:

EMAIL_BACKEND='django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend'EMAIL_FILE_PATH='/tmp/app-messages'# change this to a proper location

This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a
convenience that can be used during development.

The 'locmem' backend stores messages in a special attribute of the
django.core.mail module. The outbox attribute is created when the
first message is sent. It’s a list with an
EmailMessage instance for each message that would
be sent.

To specify this backend, put the following in your settings:

EMAIL_BACKEND='django.core.mail.backends.locmem.EmailBackend'

This backend is not intended for use in production – it is provided as a
convenience that can be used during development and testing.

If you need to change how emails are sent you can write your own email
backend. The EMAIL_BACKEND setting in your settings file is then
the Python import path for your backend class.

Custom email backends should subclass BaseEmailBackend that is located in
the django.core.mail.backends.base module. A custom email backend must
implement the send_messages(email_messages) method. This method receives a
list of EmailMessage instances and returns the
number of successfully delivered messages. If your backend has any concept of
a persistent session or connection, you should also implement the open()
and close() methods. Refer to smtp.EmailBackend for a reference
implementation.

Establishing and closing an SMTP connection (or any other network connection,
for that matter) is an expensive process. If you have a lot of emails to send,
it makes sense to reuse an SMTP connection, rather than creating and
destroying a connection every time you want to send an email.

There are two ways you tell an email backend to reuse a connection.

Firstly, you can use the send_messages() method. send_messages() takes
a list of EmailMessage instances (or subclasses),
and sends them all using a single connection.

For example, if you have a function called get_notification_email() that
returns a list of EmailMessage objects representing
some periodic email you wish to send out, you could send these emails using
a single call to send_messages:

In this example, the call to send_messages() opens a connection on the
backend, sends the list of messages, and then closes the connection again.

The second approach is to use the open() and close() methods on the
email backend to manually control the connection. send_messages() will not
manually open or close the connection if it is already open, so if you
manually open the connection, you can control when it is closed. For example:

fromdjango.coreimportmailconnection=mail.get_connection()# Manually open the connectionconnection.open()# Construct an email message that uses the connectionemail1=mail.EmailMessage('Hello','Body goes here','from@example.com',['to1@example.com'],connection=connection)email1.send()# Send the email# Construct two more messagesemail2=mail.EmailMessage('Hello','Body goes here','from@example.com',['to2@example.com'])email3=mail.EmailMessage('Hello','Body goes here','from@example.com',['to3@example.com'])# Send the two emails in a single call -connection.send_messages([email2,email3])# The connection was already open so send_messages() doesn't close it.# We need to manually close the connection.connection.close()

There are times when you do not want Django to send emails at
all. For example, while developing a Web site, you probably don’t want
to send out thousands of emails – but you may want to validate that
emails will be sent to the right people under the right conditions,
and that those emails will contain the correct content.

The easiest way to configure email for local development is to use the
console email backend. This backend
redirects all email to stdout, allowing you to inspect the content of mail.

The file email backend can also be useful
during development – this backend dumps the contents of every SMTP connection
to a file that can be inspected at your leisure.

Another approach is to use a “dumb” SMTP server that receives the emails
locally and displays them to the terminal, but does not actually send
anything. Python has a built-in way to accomplish this with a single command:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

This command will start a simple SMTP server listening on port 1025 of
localhost. This server simply prints to standard output all email headers and
the email body. You then only need to set the EMAIL_HOST and
EMAIL_PORT accordingly. For a more detailed discussion of SMTP
server options, see the Python documentation for the smtpd module.

For information about unit-testing the sending of emails in your application,
see the Email services section of the testing documentation.

This document is for Django's development version, which can be significantly different from previous releases. For older releases, use the version selector floating in the bottom right corner of this page.